What
I am about to say may come as a shock to many people and come as no surprise to others
but Cheating in Online Poker is
rife and almost at epidemic levels. This is not cheating by the sites themselves by
the way but cheating by the very players who populate those sites. Cheating is big
business in poker at all levels and wherever you find money, you will encounter people
who will do almost anything in order to get it.
The top sites do their very best at trying to detect collusion
but they face an almost impossible task and an enemy that seems forever one step ahead.
The sites know that it goes on and they do detect certain people and some accounts
have been frozen but it is only the tip of a very large iceberg. More and more people
are resorting to cheating online because they have a "get them before they get us"
mentality.
But some sites have security measures that are so lax that it is almost a joke and
I have first hand knowledge of the inner workings of certain sites by knowing people
who have actually worked in them. All this becomes very worrying for the online player
who plays above low limits especially. Teams are very sophisticated these days and
are situated over vast areas which makes tracking them an almost impossibility.
I know of one team who took an estimated $3 MILLION last year alone! Just how does
a site go about combating itself from a team of 20-25 individuals situated all over
the globe who chop and change just who plays with whom on a regular basis so as not
to leave a pattern and never stay on anyone site for too long. Many sites look for
exaggerated earn rates but they are too smart to fall into that trap.
Collusion and Bots are the real problem with online poker. I have heard from certain
sources that there is software out there that can reveal your opponents hole cards
but this is nonsense. If someone had the kind of know how to crack the sites encryption
algorithm then chances are it would take them too long to do it and it would not be
effective for that long anyway. But why would you need to do this when all you have
to do is to buy into the site legitimately. By doing this then you have entry to the
site anyway without needing specialist software or expertise.
While playing low limit would steer the player away from serious cheats, it is in
the area of low limit play that bots are becoming more and more prevalent in all of
their various guises. Bots coupled with the rake and the overall levelling of the
playing field in terms of player ability make playing low limit a virtual license
to lose money.
The bots that I am referring to here are not the ones that certain sites use to start
games which are common knowledge and legitimate. The bots that I am talking about
attach themselves to the sites software and can play for as long as the user wishes.
These bots are not great players but they are changing the face of low stakes poker
online. This is something else that the sites don't really want players knowing about.
The modern bots are really sophisticated and will alter their playing patterns and
some will even change seats.
In fact, getting back to the subject of teams working over large geographical areas,
it would not be that difficult for just one individual to construct his own team and
work from within a single room. It can be set up so that several computers are each
working with a different IP address so the site